So You Wanna Join the Peace Corps? - Part 2

Close your eyes and picture your future service.  Maybe Peace Corps conjures the image of you walking down a dusty dirt road with children holding your hand.  Maybe you're out on a lake in a dugout canoe fishing with village elders.  Maybe you're teaching in a spartan classroom while the snow falls softly outside.  Whatever the image is for you, hold it for just a moment longer.

Congratulations!  You've over-romanticized service.

Before everyone gets riled up, let me mitigate my own bold statement about Peace Corps.  You may very well find yourself in such picturesque locales (I did).  You will have your adventure.  The experience will change your life.  All of this is completely true.

The catch with service is that you're there living and breathing that world for two or more years.  It's enough time for the sheen to wear off that National Geographic image.  And behind the gloss is where the people live their lives.  They were living them long before they were photographed and they'll be living them long after your return to the States.

Part of the over-romanticism is also in how effective you will be.  You will most likely not single-handedly change the world.  More likely, you will affect the lives of a scant few in ways that never seem apparent during your entire service.  There will be community members that range from indifferent to hostile over your presence.  Many will spend the whole two years caught up in wonderment as to why you left the promised land to live in abject poverty.  Perhaps you're being punished, they may think.

Don't get hung up on these things.  While it can be disillusioning, it's also part of the experience.  Over the course of service, your community will (may?) understand Peace Corps and, more importantly, they'll understand you.  And they will slowly let you into their lives.

You will live in a fishbowl.  Over time, you will become a fixture in the community.  Sure you're a novelty.  Sure, some of them just want to milk you for your stuff.  But for some, you'll become a friend.  For some you'll become a mentor.  For some, you'll become family.

No, Peace Corps will not be what you think it will be.  It will be much less and much much more than that.  You'll come back home (maybe early) with stories, plenty of new thoughts about the world, and a few more chapters in the book of personal growth.  You will have felt extreme joy, deep depression, and experienced unearthly shades of boredom... multiple times... and quite possibly all in the course of a single day.

So would I recommend Peace Corps? While I can't say I'm an advocate for boredom or depression, I can say that my two years in Panama has had a profound affect on my life.  I see the world differently.  And for good or bad, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

After two years I thought I had a handle on Ngabes.  Maybe I don't know all the intricacies of their culture, but at least I know how we differ.  This week I was truly taken aback, bewildered in a forest of invalid assumptions, and it all has to do with landscaping.

Landscaping is a formidable task out here.  With the constant rain there is a tendency for everything to return to the earth.  Pathways don't survive long in the fecund soil and flowers get choked out by indefatigable grasses.  Then there's the children and livestock constantly running through your yard, trampling or eating whatever attempts you make at ornamentation.

Nevertheless, after months I finally had thriving bushes of beautiful white flowers that I've enjoyed over the last year.  You can guess where this is headed to I'll just hit the highlights.

Kid asks to cut grass for a few bucks.  Oti heads to Kwite to work on the aqueduct.  Oti returns to find much of the grass untouched, but the flower bushes cut down to the ground.

Peace Corps gives you a lot of practice learning to laugh in times like this.  Picture the scene, this kid whacking away at my flowers.  "I gotta get rid of these weeds.  Boy, Oti will be sooo glad!"  Meanwhile, back on the gringo farm, the act is nothing short of vandalism.

So I learned something this week.  I really thought flowers (FLOWERS!!!) were something universally appreciated.  This isn't something abstract like how weird it was for me opting to build my house next to the tranquil sounds of the river versus five feet from a neighboring family of 5+ screaming children.  After all, we're talking about flowers (FLOWERS!!!).

Sure I'm upset my flowers are gone, but the feeling is dulled by wonder.  I live in a world where flowers (for most) are weeds.  If it doesn't grow food, what's the point?  My Ngabes see the world through rose-killing glasses.  But really, how do they see the world around them?  Our realities must be so different, influenced by so many divergent and incongruous experiences.  How absolutely fascinating, right?

Water in Kwite!!!

The title says it all.  It's been a lucha, but the community of Kwite finally has clean drinking water!!!

The project has more or less been the oeuvre of my time here and the raison d'etre for my neighboring volunteer, Jon, who lives in Kwite.  Over the last 22 months we've fought an uphill battle bringing water downhill to the community, but water is finally here!

It brings me great joy to finally post these photos.  Kudos and a big "thank you" to everyone that has contributed to bringing water to Kwite!

My Rather Photogenic Finca

I live with subsistence farmers who all have their respective fincas where they grow various tubers and bananas. Last year I started cultivating my own finca in my yard.  I now have bananas, plantains, yucca, dasheen (tuber), pineapple, sugar cane, and zapallo, a squash variety similar to pumpkin.  The finca has made for good conversation and the kids love keeping track of the latest developments.  Here's some photos.

The Dichotomy of Service & Learning to Soundbite

In the not too distant future, I will be back in the US.  It will mean many things.  There will be reverse culture shock.  There will be overwhelming access to amenities.  And there will be conversations, lots and lots of conversations.  There will be friends and family, blog readers and non-blog readers, co-workers and strangers.  And, at some point, I will have to share my story.

How do you take this crazy experience and boil it down to a few soundbites, interview responses, or one's elevator speech?  This is the ultimate task in processing my time here. It's possible that even I won't fully understand my service until I have returned to the US and am packaging my experience for an audience back home.

My time in the Peace Corps is really two stories.  The first story is the fun, superficial collection of stats and anecdotes perfect for an elevator or the local bar.  For example...

Over the past two years, I have:

• Lived without electricity in a thatched roof hut that I built in the jungles of Panama
• Lived with an impoverished indigenous population called the Ngabes on the equivalent of an Indian reservation
• Bathed and washed my clothes in a river
• Hiked an hour and traveled 3.5 hours in a dugout canoe to get to the closest place with electricity
• Lived in a site without cell phone service
• Hiked in all of my food and supplies
• Built an aqueduct serving an entire village
• Built a spring capture to provide water all year long to another village
• Formed five water committees and then trained those committees on managing community funds for a future water system.  The committees were composed of mostly illiterate adults
• Saved a girl's life from a venomous snakebite
• Got amoebas and Giardia
• Learned to use a machete
• Owned and used a hammock
• Made banana beer
• Climbed the tallest peak in Panama and saw both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans
• Saw sloths, armadillos, poisonous tree frogs, crocodiles, dolphins, starfish, tons of tropical fish, vampire bats, spider, howler, and white-faced monkeys, rays, margays, kinkajous, sea turtles, countless types of tropical birds, and much more of your garden-variety Panamanian flora and fauna 
• Became at peace (or learned to kill without pause) with tarantulas, scorpions, and cockroaches

Then there's the fun statistics.  By the numbers (approximate):

• Consumed 2,000 bananas (plantains and all the other various types of bananas that exist in Panama)
• Spent 150 hours riding in a dugout canoe
• Spent $150 on candles (about 1000 candles)
• Spent 500 hours hiking through jungle
• Read about 100 books
• Lived off less than $4000/year

High five!  What an awesome two years!!!

Then there's the other story.  It's the story that I guess I've been telling all along.  In some ways, it's the easier story to blog about, but maybe not as easy to share in person.  It turns out development work is really, really hard.  My site was extremely challenging. The idea of improvement for improvement's sake is not a value shared by all cultures.  Americans are driven and chastise those that don't pull their weight.  We have a lot of development infrastructure in place that we take for granted - physical, technological, economic, social, legal, political, educational, and cultural. 

This is the story that's a little more of a buzzkill.  It's the story of children dying, projects failing, aid wasted, and all the frustrations that come with a cultural disconnect.  It's the longer, more complex story that can never be confined by the walls of an elevator.  But it's an equally important story to tell.  

And this dichotomy, this line I will learn to walk when I return to the US, that gets at the heart of service.  Peace Corps has been wonderful and humbling, full of adventures and boredom, truly engaging and fundamentally lacking, all at the same time.